Bubbles, cocoons and the handicapped

Germany recently warned the US that its current economic policies might be creating a market bubble. Germany reiterated the same warning issued earlier by China on the once powerful American country that seems to be sinking in quicksand.

Of course, this is financial talk, and I have long ago abandoned that field. As priest, I talk about something else, though I must confess that with my economics background, I still follow market developments around the world. It’s my form of rest.

But I’m more interested in talking about “bubbles” as they relate to our spiritual and moral life. They are something to be avoided at all costs, and we always have to be on guard since they can come to us in a most subtle and deceitful way given our present conditions.

Bubbles are, of course, fantasy worlds that we create. They are an artificial, false reality that we spin in our head and that can afflict many people and even societies, because of our weaknesses plus, not to forget it, the tricks of the devil. He exists!

They are a very vicious phenomenon since they have that uncanny quality of convincing us precisely that with them we are most tightly in touch with reality. That’s their specialty. But the objective reality cannot be fooled for long. Bubbles are meant to burst sooner than later.

They emerge as soon as we disengage our mind, will and heart from their proper source and goal, none other than God’s will and providence. That’s the blunt truth about this whole affair, though people might want to question or discuss it further. We don’t have space for that now.

Suffice it to say that our mind, will and heart, the most precious treasures we have, did not just come to exist spontaneously. They come from a source, and no matter how we look at it, that origin can only be traced ultimately to God.

Coming from a source, God, they also are meant to have God as their object. They need to be vitally connected to him for them to function properly. Our problem is that we get intoxicated with the powers of these endowments and we tend to use them as if we are our own Gods, our own source and goal.

We need to do all to be in touch with God always, strengthening it along the way as we encounter all sorts of challenges and temptations that can weaken such grounding proper to us. And these challenges and temptations are many.

We need to pray always, rectify our intentions, deepen our knowledge of things by going beyond what our senses and reason show us and plunging deeper into the world of faith, the spiritual and the supernatural, and all the time doing all this with a lot of naturalness, never losing our basic humanity.

 At the same, while trying to avoid creating bubbles and given some bad elements in our environments, we need to find some refuge, a kind of cocoon where we can be protected and can pursue the process of growth and transformation, much like the worm into the butterfly.

This cocoon can be in the form of a strongly established and clearly defined plan of life, consisting of practices of piety and other elements that remind us and encourage us to develop virtues in an abiding way.

Different schools of spirituality offer such plans of life. All we need to do is to choose the one that suits us best and start to live it.

Linking with God, the source and goal of our reality, is not easy. But all the effort we need to make is all worth it. Let’s just remember the wonderful stories of some handicapped people who managed to overcome their difficulty to blend with the world beautifully and contribute a lot to it.

We have Hellen Keller, deaf and blind, who with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan, found a way to know the outside world and to offer her wonderful contributions to it.

We also have the blind Louis Braille, responsible for giving the blind a way to read and to get connected with the rest of us. Then there’s that Irish Christy Brown, sick with cerebral palsy who hardly moved. He discovered that his left foot can still move, and with it he learned to write and paint and other things.

It’s all worth it. God is around. He never abandons us, though he may want to play with us, sometimes easy, sometimes tough.

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